Samuel Butler

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

Man is God’s highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.

Coercion is evil precisely because it…eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself into one.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

Whatever advice you give, be short.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions.What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world.

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.